At Capitol Cinema

The Road

The Road

December 31, 2009

Editor's note: “The Road” opens Friday at the Capitol Theater. “An Education” finishes its run tonight. Show times are at 7:30 p.m. nightly. Tickets are $8. The Road In Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel “The Road,” no word is repeated so often and with such steady emphasis as “ash.” The stuff is everywhere. It clogs the air. It blankets the ground. It infiltrates the lungs of the protagonist we know only as The Man, who is shepherding his young son (The Boy) across a doomed landscape where most of Earth's few survivors are marauding cannibals. But in director John Hillcoat's adaptation of McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, there's not even a cigarette's worth. Soot-deficiency is forgivable, but Hillcoat's “The Road” is missing other things, too. Though the film mostly strives to stay close to the book, it fails to translate its essence and somehow feels more dreary than it should - which is saying something for a story about the apocalypse. Despite its end-of-the-world setting, McCarthy's book is, at heart, a father-son parable. The cause of the world's destruction is intentionally vague. Their survival, moving with obsessive carefulness southward on a road, is a journey with Biblical undertones. The Man (Viggo Mortensen) is best viewed as a weary but strong Hemingway-esque hero. But in the film, our dominant impression is of his morbidity. Several times he instructs his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) on how he must kill himself should the “bad men” get him. Better would have been to focus intently on the constant, simple tension of their survival - surveying the path ahead, gathering drips and drops of gas, making it through the night. (R, 111 minutes)